Guild Wars 2

I had a good time, even having missed the middle part of the event. I liked the lore and the scavenger hunts and the cutscenes and all that stuff: very cool! I liked exploring and finding a new zone and the idea of a “relief” effort in the story (even if it gave junk items!). Overall I had fun.

The parts I didn’t like were the incredibly buggy events that were required for the scavenger hunts (which just seems crazy considering you knew thousands of people would be doing those events), and the massive lag/FPS drop/the old invisible enemies problem during the LA invasion and the last slog (also seems like poor planning on your part given you knew the entire zone would be in one tiny area the entire time). I’d suggest future events either split the zone populations even further (maybe 1/4 of what you had, and reduce the difficulty accordingly) or encourage people to spread out all over the zone somehow.

Making events one-time only does hurt. I was lucky enough to manage to be online during two out of three, but I would be frustrated if I had missed them. And while the final reward was amazing – easily the best reward I’ve gotten in the game by a longshot – it does feel a little diminished somehow to know that other people got effectively 100+ gold. Of course, the entire game is based on random chance, so I don’t know how it could be different.

Minion AI is a tricky thing to fix because it’s not a consistent problem. Sometimes when I start to attack something, all my minions pile on, exactly like they are supposed to. But every so often, a few minions join in, and others stand around doing nothing. And rarely – but occasionally – all my minions will do absolutely nothing whatsoever (except the Golem of course, but he doesn’t actually attack my target because he’s half a map away beating on some other random thing).

Usually using minion powers on a target will fix this, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes waiting a few seconds will fix this, but sometimes it doesn’t.

And then you have odd cases like: what exactly are minions supposed to do when a minion is getting attacked, but not me? Sometimes they react. Sometimes they do nothing. Two situations that happen very frequently are: monsters run past me and everything around me to pound on the Bone Fiend (who had not attacked previously) while no other minions do anything, and the Flesh Golem runs off to attack anything within about double normal aggro range (which is why he isn’t helping the Bone Fiend).

The sad part is: we have no idea if this is how it is supposed to work, or a bug! The only thing that really happens with consistency is: if a minion is attacked (and I am not already attacking something), it attacks its attacker. But other minions? Who knows? What is “right” and what is “wrong?”

I did notice that most classes seemed to get balance changes while we mostly got bug fixes. It’s a good start, though.

Still waiting for that glorious day to read in the patch notes: “Minion AI substantially improved.”

I’d also like “Bone Fiend’s over-the-top aggro range and starting aggro of 10,000% reduced to act like any other creature in the game,” and “Flesh Golem now behaves as if it were on your team and not its own team,” but I realize some things are almost too much to hope for.

There are a tiny fraction of people who have that much gold in this game. (Remember the screen shot from the guy with 80k gems?) Those people are basically playing a different game than us. Kudos to Anet for trying to keep up with those few while also trying to satisfy the masses.

My suggestion is to make it so that dying is not really even possible in the level 2-5 areas. I started a new character today, all wide-eyed and innocent, and ran off to my first heart which had an event spawn nearby: kill a veteran! So I ran to it, started to do what I could, although I noticed it could kill me in about 4 hits while I could barely damage the thing – and it sometimes flew off and regenerated. So I really started taking some chances, and BOOM, downed – and quickly, dead. So level 2, first event: dead. Along with whatever wide-eyed innocence my character had.

It honestly makes me not want to bother with that character any more. So I thought I’d throw out this suggestion. Thanks.

“…If this environment doesn’t suit you, then you shouldn’t expect to craft for money.”
This is exactly what I was thinking of when I said “it cannot [be profitable].” My hyperbole really meant that it cannot be profitable in and of itself: you have to play markets that have very narrow windows, exactly like Daulnay said. In fact, his post is by far the best response to the generic and often-asked “how do you make money on crafting?” I’ve seen.

I like Webba’s suggestions above, especially 1-3. Mutually-exclusive high-level recipes are how WoW makes crafting more profitable (or at least more guild-friendly). And I also wish crafting still gave XP gains after 400: although this might drive demand for T6 items even higher.

I don’t think one could say Blizzard cares about gold selling less than Anet. Both companies want what is best for their customers and their game. Also, Blizzard’s problem is roughly 5 times what Anet’s problem is from sheer sub numbers. And finally, Blizzard is (or was) definitely introducing legal gold buying recently though pets that could be purchased for real money and sold on the auction house. It’s hard to really compare WoW to Anet but on the other hand it’s hard not to compare anything to WoW.

Astraea: I went out of my way not to say that anyone needs to buy gold to play.

I never played D3 so I don’t know anything about their black market, but I would be shocked if one didn’t exist at all. I think that game would be a good comparison, though.

Slic: Legit gold buying will never be able to compete with black market prices. If they drop their prices in half, the black market will as well. Black market gold has no cost.

Black market gold sales are a really interesting conundrum.

On one hand, they have come to the conclusion that people are going to buy gold for this game, period. Nothing they can do will stop this. So, from that perspective, it makes sense to give up fighting it directly and provide a legitimate way for players to buy gold (fighting it indirectly).

On the other hand, that makes buying gold a revenue stream. And without a monthly fee, it is the primary revenue stream in GW2. This means you actually need players to buy gold. So, you tune the game to subtly drive players to want more gold (extremely high gold sinks, obvious quality-of-life improvements like large bank space, etc.).

However, because players are driven to buy gold, you are also increasing the allure of the black market again. And because the black market gold is “free,” the legit market will never be able to beat its prices. And so the temptation to use the black market remains, even though part of the original point of the gold-selling system was to combat it.

Now, I don’t own a multi-national, billion-dollar company and I don’t know all they know. But clearly, they have decided that the temptation to use the black market as driven by extremely tightly-tuned gold sinks in-game – plus the revenue it generates – is worth more than fighting the temptation to use the black market without heavy tuning or revenue streams. My ultimate question is: are people more or less tempted to use the black market in a game like GW2 vs. a game without a legitimate gold selling mechanic? Did they make the problem worse, but they’re also using it as revenue so that’s ok? Or does it actually help cut down on people’s use of the black market, and the revenue is a bonus?

Only the devs can actually answer that question, but what do you think?

Prices will stabilize. The changes are temporary. The sky is not falling.

We are moving from a bot-driven economy to a player-driven economy, and we’ve all agreed we’ll like the latter better. Just be patient.

I think everyone agrees that fewer bots is better for the game. The fluctuations we see in the short term (and it will be short) are just market reaction to an over-abundance of supply being removed. I agree that what we will ultimately end up with (long term) is a market that is actually player-based, instead of bot-based. And I will assume that once this happens, the DR that purportedly is there to guard against bots will be removed, making hard-core farming more viable for players. End result: more people are happy.

For those complaining about legendaries, I think the entire point was that legendaries are supposed to take months or even a year: it’s just that when the game started, things were not perfect and those who took advantage of weak systems early on reaped the rewards. And I am NOT even talking about exploiters here: I am talking about the people who put in the time and effort early on and took advantage of systems that were weak. Now that everyone knows how to make a legendary, for example, prices for certain items are far higher than before. That was their advantage of getting there early, and that’s just how legendaries work: if you know more, then everyone else knows more and prices adjust upwards accordingly. It will always take longer the longer you wait. The trading post was a mass experiment in completely free markets, and this is how free markets work: those who are rich stay rich.

Ultimately, if you want to compete in the legendary game but you don’t want to spend the massive amounts of hard-core time required to farm up a legendary, a means has been provided to you: real money. That’s the whole point: MMOs are a grind, and if you want to skip it you can choose to pay real money to get your pixel rewards.

It cannot.

The only way people have ever made money from crafting is niche markets that are quickly mass-discovered and are no longer niche markets. Kudos to you if you’ve discovered one, but due to the way crafting works and the way the TP works, it will never be profitable for the masses.

Crafting, as far as I can tell, is meant to be an alternate way to gain XP – NOT gold.

Tarnished Coast just went uncontested!

(My post was mainly talking about the point after you moved some weird water orb that had never been talked about in my story previously. The part before the weird orb was mainly just moving from point to point and had nothing to do with enemy waves. I learned from earlier missions that when the game tells you to go somewhere, you ignore EVERYTHING and just go there! Stopping to fight just means you die against waves of infinite enemies.)

For what it’s worth I just completed this mission and it worked. I actually had sort of the opposite experience of many in this thread: I think each wave had about 3-6 enemies and was completely trivial to defeat. In fact, at one point I wondered why I was even there because I could barely make it to the next risen attack area before everything was dead.

Also, I noticed that (as has been pointed out) in the final wave near the docks, the risen were not “enemies” but rather “attackable neutrals” – i.e. yellow and not red. I assumed this was done intentionally so that your character wouldn’t get overwhelmed quite so quickly (although, again: I think I managed to kill one guy as by the time I got there, the NPCs had cleaned up), but now I see it’s a long-standing bug. Just wanted to say this is still happening!

The official responses on this have basically been along the lines of, “this is something we’d love to get to one day but we have bigger fish to fry in the meantime.”

I completely agree with the sentiment that there should have been more done, but I also understand that for many people, they’d rather have more playable content. It’s a constant choice.

This was much worse before the recent change. The recent change allowed you to die and then start from the checkpoint on the other side – although, to be fair, there is no reason you would know this or for you to expect it to be possible. The only way you can find out is to die and give up – then it allows you to skip it. Before the change, you just died/downed, and there was no way to skip it.

On top of this, when I was having trouble with this mission I also didn’t know you could revive yourself (why would I – the tooltip for Downed 4 says something about calling for allies to assist you, and I’d only been downed about twice before this mission). So I just died over and over. Waiting for yourself to die takes even longer, so it was over 1 minute each time for a 3-second run.

This isn’t the first, or even fifth thread about this mission. Thanks for the continued feedback, though! This is easily the worst mission I’ve seen in the game, and thankfully nothing like this happens again in that storyline!

“I did not consider the MK boss map as a jumping puzzle. All you are doing is dropping down. And I made it so there are MANY paths down.”
“I was just seriously surprised that anyone would consider the verticality in that map a ‘jumping puzzle’.”

It absolutely was a jumping puzzle. It required precise jumping and penalized you with (thankfully harmless) death and a location reset if you failed. How is that not a jumping puzzle?

I suspect that as a jumping puzzle designer, you’re very good at jumping puzzles. Certainly, the Mad King dungeon was not a particularly difficult jumping puzzle, but it -was- difficult and it required platforming skills. I suspect that perhaps you (and maybe most of your team?) is so good that something like this seems too trivial to be a “jumping puzzle?” That doesn’t mean it isn’t.

Honestly, as a long-time veteran of side-scrolling, first-person, and over-the-shoulder 2D and 3D platforming games, I still had trouble getting to the chest at the bottom of the map without dying at least once, even after doing the puzzle half a dozen times. (Feeling like I had to rush due to the fact that the person who made the party leaving the dungeon would kill your chance for loot did not help.) I didn’t mind it, but I knew it was a jumping puzzle.

I think Morrigan is right: so many guides / legendary owners / practical people advise getting your precursor last. But maybe people should start going for that part first, so they can get frustrated and quit long before they’ve spent all that extra time and effort.

Really, though, I expect precursors will be available one day to anyone with enough patience. If you can farm 100g to throw in the forge, you can farm 300g to pay off some flipper for your precursor. And if you already farmed a million karma, you should be cool with farming.

What a strange thread. I’m very happy that finally, there exists a cool, sought-after skin that is actually accessible to anyone – even though I’ll still never get one myself! There are still only a few hundred in existence for 2 million players: I think it’s still pretty rare.

As I understand it, the clocktower is, in a way, a PvP event: you’re not just competing with the clock, but other players, as whoever is fastest will set the pace. So yes: they are blocking your view on purpose, since it helps them win and you lose. I’m not sure if it’s griefing or just competitive play.

No. Absolutely not.

In all cases except tier 6 (400-level) crafting, it is a huge waste of gold to make your own equipment. You will do much better financially to sell the mats you would have used on the TP and then purchase the equipment you want on the TP instead. This is doubly true since the TP-purchased crafting items are listed for a few copper above vendor price. So at the end of the day, you can always wear crafted armor (that you did not make yourself) for a few copper each tier. Take the mats you would have used and sell them if you’d like to make gold.

It seems like having a few GMs playing the game on each server and hanging out in areas that constantly get reported on these forums for having bots might help. Bots have to have a strategy; it can’t be completely random because that isn’t efficient. I’m sure screen shots help a lot.

Thanks for the update, either way. We’re looking forward to a few weeks from now when your changes are in place!

Wow, nice luck on all the exotics! I’ve gotten nothing but junk greens and the one nice thing I received was 5 fine transmutation stones.

OP: Your definition of “casual” is amusing to me.

I thought it was a bug! Thanks to those in this thread who said you can hit “enter” to lock in a number. I had no idea.

I also do not like the new system. The old way had flaws but at least we knew how to use it.

Answer: none of them.

The Halloween weapons are basically legendaries that don’t require precursors: therefore, they will absolutely be cheaper. A precursor by itself can be over 300 gold already, and prices are rising.

I’ll go back to the math thing: 31.5 days out of 56 days playing time means an -average- of 13.5 hours a day playing. Average. Assuming this person sleeps 7.5 hrs/day (probably too high) that leaves 3 hours a day to eat, shower, browse this forum, check facebook, leave the house… It seems like it would be impossible for this person to attend school or hold a job. (Maybe if he slept more like 5 hrs/day and binge-played on the weekends, he could attend a university with a light schedule?)

The guy who posted the 900 hour time (37.5 days out of 56) spent an AVERAGE of 16 hours a day playing. Sixteen hours per day. Even assuming 7 hours of sleep a night that leaves ONE HOUR PER DAY for all other body maintenance, which is basically impossible (so he slept less than 7 hrs/day). I don’t think there is any way someone could possibly fit any sort of job/school into this schedule, and it seems like it would probably require another person to help with daily maintenance to even live this way.

Guys: congrats on your achievements, but in all seriousness: put the game down and go outside for a little while! I am not judging, or jealous: I am concerned for your health.

Keep in mind master kits give a 25% chance to get an ecto, and BL kits give a 50% chance. It’s possible, but not likely, to get nothing 25 times.

However, given the price of rares and the continually dropping price of ectos, if that happened to me I’d just buy the ectos.

That is why it is called “gambling.”

I agree with others in this thread who state that rather than complain about your right to offend others in a global, privately-owned game (i.e. you have no right), why not just be more creative in your name creation? As others have pointed out in other threads, given the naming rules there are something on the order of millions or billions of possible names per player (and that’s after assuming 99.9% of random letter combinations are gibberish).

The dev response says the email is correct, but the email says “October 22.” Also, it apparently hasn’t started yet, and won’t until tonight(?). So the email is not correct.

It’s particularly bad if you are solo (which most players seem to be) or if you don’t have a very high DPS build. I know outleveling an area seems to help a lot because I can simply kill things that much faster. I think the general “respawn” rate is tuned pretty high because they expect players to work in groups or be focusing on damage constantly. It does feel sort of random sometimes, though.

“Audience is part of it. I love to write, but it’s a lot harder to secure an audience for written media than visual media. Youtube is a massive community to which anyone can upload their work, and which everyone browses. Getting your written guides out there is a lot harder, and requires either partnership with an existing website or your own blog.”

I agree with this post as well, not just because of the “ease of use” point, but also because of the “feedback” thing. It is much faster and easier to get and give feedback on YouTube than it is with nearly any written form of a guide. I’ve done video game guides before, and other than page hits and personal emails you have no idea if people read it. YouTube lets the entire world call you a kitten (I actually wrote “kitten”) and banter back and forth about it.

However, it’s not just about feedback: the difference is in acknowledgement. I did those video game guides for me: I didn’t care if people read them. But if you post something on YouTube, odds are: you care. You probably care a great deal, and you want that feedback, good or bad.

OP, I appreciate your point and I read the whole thing. I agree that it is quite frustrating to be faced with sorting through 100 hours of useless video for the one scrap of information I need vs. a text search which is 1000x faster and easier.

The thing that kills me about the YouTube phenomenon is that watching videos takes FOREVER. Everyone I’ve ever watched is terrible at making video guides: they spend 95% of their time wasting time. (I am still wishing for the “fast forward” button on YouTube – something to play videos at 2x/5x/10x speed but keep the sound going.) I do not buy the argument that it’s some kind of ADD, “NOW” generation thing because YouTube is an extremely inefficient method of distributing or gathering information. I can’t tell you how many 3-5 minute “guides” can be summed up in less than a paragraph of written text that takes 10 seconds to read. Occasionally YouTube is better for certain types of information: watching someone complete a jumping puzzle can be more effective than reading about it, for example. But otherwise it’s a huge waste of time.

As for the why: I think you are correct in that it is a generational thing. Anet has been spectacular about communicating directly to its playerbase in social media sites, and I think they are doing a great job of hitting a younger market space. Younger people also have more time and energy to make guides. And I think younger people (typically) tend to get their information from YouTube more often than older people. As for why, I would suspect some factors include: ease of uploading information (most smartphones and smartphone apps have a YouTube button now, making it so easy you can do it on accident), ease of access through mobile devices, and the fact that a tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage of people have used YouTube to garner some internet fame and others are trying to replicate that.

I’m guessing it’s similar to how younger people are actually worse at “using computers” than older people, in the same way that I have no idea how my car actually works: I just drive it. For the same reason that you cannot purchase a stick shift except in very specific cars, people use YouTube: it’s easier and faster and they don’t have to think about it. And don’t get me wrong: this isn’t a judgement. It’s just where the world is headed.

I love the idea of waypoints, but I’ve come to hate using them because of the cost. Dying hits you twice: once for the repair, and again for the waypoint. Ouch.

“Arenanet even made a video envisaging the ‘invasion’ nature of the DE chains there…”
You must have an awesome server because after hanging out in that zone for a couple days I just left. The DE chains never made it anywhere because there were never more than one or two people doing the DEs, and you cannot solo most of them. That, or they were broken: they seem to break fairly regularly.

+1 for EndlessDreamer

I like the pirate one you can buy from the ghost at the end of the goonies-style jumping puzzle in Lion’s Arch.

Geeo: you’re right: it IS a coincidence.

Sorry, but that is it exactly: a coincidence. People really want to see patterns in things in which patterns do not exist. It’s human nature. It’s part of a small sample bias that we all have. But it doesn’t make it true.

At this point the case has been made but some people simply do not believe it. And that’s fine: I doubt anyone will say anything to convince you. But the crux of your argument sounds to me like someone saying, “last month it rained every Tuesday. This month, it hasn’t rained on two out of three Tuesdays. The weather has been nerfed!”

Mitsu: The OP was talking about everyone who plays MMOs as far as I could tell.

Also, there’s not really a “both sides” of “tiny samples don’t represent any sort of real analysis.”

Calavera is right. Quick, repeatable content doesn’t give good loot because it is quick and repeatable.

(If you really want to complain, wait until you finish the personal story! )

OP and others who complain that something has changed: By all accounts, dev reports, and knowledge of random numbers: you are wrong. No offense, but that’s just how random numbers work. If you failed to get a rare 100 times in a row that still wouldn’t mean anything. You were lucky before and now you are unlucky: that is the only truth here. Congrats on making as much money as you have!

It’s really, really hard for people to understand that a tiny sample size doesn’t mean anything. Just because you, your guild, everyone you know, and 100 people who write magazine articles all think something – that doesn’t actually account for ANYTHING. The non-random sample size is still far, far too small.

Oh wow, re-reading this thread I had no idea that Master tools weren’t the same as Oric. tools – thanks for the head’s up, everyone! I’ll go dump those now since it’s not worth trying to figure them out and waste high-level nodes.

Mungrul: you should have said, “swift kick to the kittens” (and actually used the word “kittens” as I just did).

They changed that shortly after launch; you used to be able to resell them as well (prorated based on use). However, I’m guessing that since you can buy them for karma and Anet is so incredibly scared of people turning karma into gold they quickly changed it after launch to where they are like all karma-bought items: useless once you’re done with them.

@Blyth: It is certainly possible that the precursors have an even lower chance to proc than a normal exotic. If there really are only about 30 exotic greatsword possibilities (or even if there were 100), that would seem to be the case.

That doesn’t mean that any given set of 4 exotics will give you a better overall chance, though.

(Although I am pretty sure they did this because you can buy tools with karma and they are SO against karma→gold they’d rather mess up other systems than to allow it.)

I agree with the OP’s suggestions and complaints. I get that gathering is supposed to be another money sink but changing all tools to become soulbound and unsellable was a bit harsh.

I noticed some of the elder wood-baring trees seem to respawn much slower now, but I don’t know if it’s related to the patch or I am just not very observant.